Handling of scrap materials has been made easier and more effective through the use of grapples on the boom of a backhoe. These grapples, with a stationary or minimally moving lower jaw, and a swinging top jaw, are effective in tearing down buildings, clearing debris at construction sites, moving and loading scrap metal including wrecked auto bodies around a scrap salvage yard.
For removing rubber tires from wrecked auto bodies, such grapples have been fitted with shears on the back side of the lower jaws. Such shears are effective to punch through steel wheel rims and cut through the rubber tires and through the steel cables in the tire beads so that the hand work in handling such auto bodies is minimized. It has been found that after an auto body has been correctly positioned by the grapple, the shear on the back side of the lower grapple jaw can actually clip through the frame of the auto body and effectively cut the body into two pieces.
It should be recognized that although auto bodies exist in substantial numbers in a metal reprocessing scrap yard, and require significant amounts of attention, metal scrap also exists in many other forms. A few of these include steel, copper and aluminum wire and cable; structural steel in the form of channels, pillars, I-beams, angle irons, and lattice steel joists; castings of innumerable shapes, forms and sizes, and materials; and pipes and ducts of steel, cast iron, copper and other materials, all in a wide variety of sizes and lengths.
Wire and cable is particularly difficult to handle in a reprocessing yard. Substantial amounts of such wire and cable is scrap from power transmission lines, and exists on large spools which are to be salvaged and reused. Such transmission line wire is often one inch to one and one half inches in diameter and may be stranded copper or aluminum with steel core strands. It is extremely stiff.
Also large quantities of such wire and cable exists in the form of tangled bundles or heaps. Reprocessing requires that all such wire and cable cut into six to ten foot lengths for feeding into a reprocessing machine.
Previously, such scrap wire and cable has been largely handled manually. Workmen with hand operated bolt cutters have cut the wire and cable into manageable lengths. Of course, the cost of such labor adds significantly to the cost of scrap reprocessing.
Although lengths of structural steel and pipes have been clipped into manageable pieces by known shears, prepositioning of the lengths for shears has always been a problem so that the shears can effectively exert the necessary amount of cutting force.